Coney Island, 1911: Coralie Sardie is the daughter of
a self-proclaimed scientist and professor who acts as
the impresario of The Museum of Extraordinary Things,
a boardwalk freak show offering amazement and
entertainment to the masses. An extraordinary swimmer,
Coralie appears as the Mermaid alongside performers
like the Wolfman, the Butterfly Girl,and a 100 year
old turtle, in her father's "museum". She swims
regularly in New York's Hudson River, and one night
stumbles upon a striking young man alone in the woods
photographing moon-lit trees. From that moment,
Coralie knows her life will never be the same.

The dashing photographer Coralie spies is Eddie Cohen,
a Russian immigrant who has run away from his father's
Lower East Side Orthodox community. As Eddie
photographs the devastation on the streets of New York
following the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire, he becomes embroiled in the mystery behind a
young woman's disappearance and the dispute between
factory owners and labourers. In the tumultuous times
that characterized life in New York between the world
wars, Coralie and Eddie's lives come crashing together
in Alice Hoffman's mesmerizing, imaginative, and
romantic new novel.

The
Black-Eyed Blonde,Benjamin Black

Maybe it was time I forgot about Nico Peterson,
and his sister, and the Cahuilla Club, and Clare
Cavendish. Clare? The rest would be easy to put
out of my mind, but not the black-eyed blonde .
. .

It is the early 1950s. In Los Angeles, Private
Detective Philip Marlowe is as restless and lonely
as ever, and business is a little slow. Then a new
client arrives: young, beautiful, and expensively
dressed, Clare Cavendish wants Marlowe to find her
former lover, a man named Nico Peterson.

Soon Marlowe will find himself not only under the
spell of the Black-Eyed Blonde; but tangling with
one of Bay City’s richest families – and
developing a singular appreciation for how far
they will go to protect their fortune . . .

The Wives Of Los Alamos,
TaraShea Nesbit

Their average age was twenty-five. They came from
Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London and Chicago –
and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure or
at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned
to hardship in the desolate military town where
everything was a secret, including what their
husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in
barely finished houses with a P.O. Box for an
address, in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all
for the benefit of ‘the project’ that didn’t exist
as far as the greater world was concerned. They
were constrained by the words they couldn’t say
out loud, the letters they couldn’t send home, the
freedom they didn’t have.

Though they were strangers, they joined together –
babies were born, friendships were forged,
children grew up. But then ‘the project’ was
unleashed and even bigger challenges faced the
women of Los Alamos, as they struggled with the
burden of their contribution towards the creation
of the most destructive force in mankind’s history
– the atomic bomb.

Boy,
Snow, Bird,
Helen Oyeyemi

BOY Novak turns twenty and decides to try for a
brand-new life. Flax Hill, Massachusetts, isn’t exactly
a welcoming town, but it does have the virtue of being
the last stop on the bus route she took from New York.
Flax Hill is also the hometown of Arturo Whitman –
craftsman, widower, and father of Snow.

SNOW is mild-mannered, radiant and deeply
cherished – exactly the sort of little girl Boy never
was, and Boy is utterly beguiled by her. If Snow
displays a certain inscrutability at times, that’s
simply a characteristic she shares with her father,
harmless until Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister, Bird.

When BIRD is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate
the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and
Boy, Snow and Bird are broken apart.

Bark,
Lorrie Moore

In these eight masterful stories, Lorrie Moore explores
the passage of time, and summons up its inevitable
sorrows and comic pitfalls.

In 'Debarking', a newly divorced man tries to keep his
wits about him as the US prepares to invade Iraq. In
'Foes', a political argument goes grotesquely awry as
the events of 9/11 unexpectedly manifest at a
fundraising dinner in Georgetown. In 'The Juniper Tree',
a teacher, visited by the ghost of her recently deceased
friend, is forced to sing 'The Star Spangled Banner' in
a kind of nightmare reunion. And in 'Wings', we watch
the unraveling of two once-hopeful musicians, who
neither held fast to their dreams, nor struck out along
other paths.

Gimlet-eyed social observation, the public and private
absurdities of American life, dramatic irony, and
enduring half-cracked love wend their way through each
of these narratives, in Moore's characteristic style
that is always tender, never sentimental and often
heartbreakingly funny.

The Spinning Heart,
Donal Ryan

“My father still lives back the road past
the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there
every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me
down. He hasn’t yet missed a day of letting me down.”

In the aftermath of Ireland’s financial collapse,
dangerous tensions surface in an Irish town. As violence
flares, the characters face a battle between public
persona and inner desires. Through a chorus of unique
voices, each struggling to tell their own kind of truth,
a single authentic tale unfolds.

The Spinning Heart speaks for contemporary
Ireland like no other novel. Wry, vulnerable, all-too
human, it captures the language and spirit of rural
Ireland and with uncanny perception articulates the
words and thoughts of a generation. Technically daring
and evocative of Patrick McCabe and J.M. Synge, this
novel of small-town life is witty, dark and sweetly
poignant.